We Keep Increasing The Amount Of Money We Spend To Watch TV … And Here’s Why

In the “olden” days of television, when the only way I could watch my favorite shows was through the hulking box connected to my tube TV, I used to be a cheap bastard, at least when it came to my cable subscription.

I had basic cable, and maybe the sports package (had to watch the Yankees, no matter what!), but I never subscribed to any premium channels like HBO or Showtime. The attitude probably stemmed from my father, who refused to fund our family’s ever-expanding TV habit and his sons’ desire to see Eddie Murphy specials and movies with swearing and naked women. Back then, it made sense: Why pay extra for a channel that had nothing useful to watch?

The rationale embedded itself into my brain as I entered into adulthood and paid for cable myself. Even when HBO had great shows like The Wire and The Sopranos, I stuck to my guns, figuring it wasn’t worth it just for that one show. When anyone asked me if I saw any of those shows, I’d proudly state “I don’t have HBO.” When I entered this profession twelve years ago, I relied on screeners to watch premium cable shows.

Now, though? I pay for everything. I’ve got the mondo cable package, including HBO, Showtime and Starz. On top of that, I pay monthly fees for Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. And I’m not the only one who is in this situation. Whether people are cord-cutters or have the luxe cable package, anyone who’s a fan of television has been finding themselves handing out a few dollars each to a number of services. And, while those services aren’t that expensive, those $8-10 per month fees add up.

“People discovered that ‘What are you watching?’ went from being just the question you would ask when you couldn’t think of anything else to say to being really a compelling question to ask. People began to use who was watching what as a kind of sorting device; it became a matchmaking event.”—Grant McCracken, cultural anthropologist

How did we get here? How did all these services manage to get into our wallets? And why do we keep paying?

We know good value when we see it. So many of us have heard the term “Peak TV” over the last couple of years that it’s become as much a part of the lexicon as “jump the shark.” But what the term encapsulates isn’t just the fact that there are more scripted series on TV than ever before – 455 of them in 2016, according to FX – but more than ever are actually good. We’re not in a situation where there’s Hill Street Blues and Taxi and the rest of the shows are like Small Wonder; even “lesser” shows are better than much of what we watched even a decade ago.

“The ways in which we traditionally diminished TV, that was giving way to this notion that, oh, this is where the action is in American culture,” says Grant McCracken, a cultural anthropologist who was commissioned by Netflix and Harris Interactive in 2014 to study viewers’ binge watching habits.

“That means that TV is now more valuable and people are prepared to pay more for it, but something very interesting starts to happen culturally,” he says. “People now discovered that ‘What are you watching?’ went from being just the question you would ask at a bar of a stranger — because you couldn’t think of anything else to say — to being really a compelling question to ask. People began to use who was watching what as a kind of sorting device, it became a matchmaking event. Now TV came to kind of dominate the conversation. Now, it’s really worth something.”

Streaming services pump out lots of good shows. There’s always one show that hooks people into subscribing to a streaming service. For Netflix, that was House of Cards in 2013; Amazon had Transparent the following year. But instead of resting their laurels on one or two shows, the big streaming players have been laying down massive amounts of money to create a steady stream of original content, and most of it has been pretty good.

“At any given time, one generally keeps HBO for a couple of really important programs. You keep HBO because you love The Wire, The Sopranos, now Game of Thrones. I think there was a sense that the price tag on an HBO subscription seemed so high when, in fact, you weren’t watching the movies or the comedy [specials],” says Robert Thompson, Professor of Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “Then, something like Netflix would come along. You could get all of these movies, all of these TV shows. That’s one of the reasons why I think Netflix is now so aggressively making new stuff is to make sure that bench is deep.”

Think about this for a second: On Netflix, you can follow a marathon of HoC with one of Orange is the New Black, then move to Stranger Things, The OA and The Crown. In the ’90s and ’00s, the only way you could binge watch great shows is to wait for the DVDs to come out, and lay out $60 on top of your subscription to HBO or Showtime. Now you get all of that, at your fingertips, for $10 per month.

“If you want to watch both Transparent and Orange is the New Black, what one is essentially doing now is putting together, via the digital channels, what amounts to something very similar to what a cable package used to be. I am seeing more and more, even among students who are heavily indebted with student loans, certainly many of them don’t have a lot of money to spare, who are subscribing to both HBO Now, and Hulu, and Netflix, and Amazon Prime,” says Thompson.

We all suffer from a severe case of FOMO. Do you feel bad if you haven’t seen La La Land? Probably not. But if someone in a crowd says “Poor Barb!” and you don’t know that’s a Stranger Things reference, you get a little anxious, don’t you?

Netflix

It’s a strange phenomenon; while the shows on the big streaming networks attract audiences that are a small fraction of the TV-watching population, the cultural awareness of such shows is so big that the “What are you watching?” question, as McCracken stated, is more anxiety-inducing than ever.

“Remember how people used to talk about music in the 1990s? When you find yourself in a conversation with a relative stranger who mentions a band, you want to be the person who recognizes that band, that establishes your credentials as a sophisticated consumer of music, and you want to have heard of a band that your opposite has not heard of,” he says. “Something like that started to happen in the world of television where people were searching the catalogue for their own enthusiasms and trying to keep up with what were shared enthusiasms, the big, huge programs at the center of things and things further down the mountain, as it were. They were now actively exploring.”

The peer pressure of you Facebook and Twitter feeds also play a role in getting you to shell out. “Social media has become a major, major marketing tool for these shows,” says Thompson. “Probably the most powerful promotional advertising mechanism for a lot of these programs in the Peak TV era is completely unofficial, unauthorized advertising and marketing that happens through people having conversations on social media. Would people still be paying for these programs if social media didn’t exist? If nothing else, it happens on the same machine. You’re watching Netflix, oftentimes, on the same device in which you’re talking about what you just watched or are watching on Netflix.”

“Would people still be paying for these programs if social media didn’t exist? Oftentimes, you’re watching Netflix on the same device that you use to talk about what you just watched on Netflix.”

But it’s not like you’re not putting food on the table in order to be caught up on Jessica Jones or the Gilmore Girls revival; you may not notice it, but that ten – or thirty or forty – bucks may have just been spent on something else in the past.

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“I think people say as long as the streaming providers continue to create stuff that’s irresistible, and by irresistible I mean it forms a conversation you will be excluded from unless you’ve seen episodes two and three, then people will continue to pay what they have to,” says McCracken. “I think what consumers do in a situation like this is say, ‘Look, I used to have this sense of a limit to my budget for television, and it was whatever it was, $200, $300 a month, but TV has gotten so much better and it matters so much to my social life and my personal life that I’m prepared to take money from other parts of the budget and put it into my TV budget. I’ll just spend less on dinners out.”

With all of these great shows that I’m eager to watch, movies and sporting events have gone by the wayside in my house; I’ve gone to the theater to see one movie (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) in the last four years and haven’t been to a Yankee game since before I was married. My interest has gone to the glowing screen in my living room, and since there’s so much good stuff, my money is going to where I think I’ll get the biggest bang for my buck, even if it means my vitamin D levels sink a bit.

Now excuse me while I get elbows deep into season 3 of Black Mirror. I’m sure somewhere, my dad is shaking his head.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.